I guess contests like these intend to foster out of the box thinking. But once that very out of the box thinking surfaces every competitor cries foul, including (some) teachers. So, do they perform such competitions because they have to? Or do they just fail to see what they engage them to?

I see another benefit of using fail to ban. That is, it helps a little to keep the log files (a little) shorter.

It's a reasonable enough way of protecting hosted websites, especially if you're running more than one server. You can monitor multiple logs for abuse from different sources, and then update all servers to drop traffic from those sources. So, if someone runs a WordPress vulnerability scan on a hosted website, you can detect that and immediately refuse any mail/ssh/dns/www/ftp/other service from that IP.

It requires a little bit of kludging to do this though. :-( As packaged, it's not much more useful than a hacky shell script.

Full link to the passage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren#Personal_life

And, given that it heats water, what if it gets applied to someone in heavy rain, say with clothes soaked? Would it go so far to effectively boil the person?

I initially thought along the same lines, but not outdoors.

Depending on the energy consumption, this technology might serve as a nice protection inside buildings. Like areas where you don't want unauthorized personel to go to. For everyone else you could "lower the shield" for the moment of passing-through.

So, pushing this thought a little further, I'd say such a (or any) deity and us have at least this one thing in common: looking in amazement at those primes.

The idea looks like what already failed on the fictional character of RoboCop - be too tame.

I disagree. Those are real people who do that kind of work. When I was looking for online work at sites like getafreelancer or rentacoder there usually were tons of job offers regarding forum posts/blog comments. Rarely labeled as forum/blog spam but often meaning that. Here's a typical (current) job offer for forum posts: http://is.gd/c3dIo (This is not intended as advertising but only to provide an impression of such a job offer and as evidence that such job offers actually do exist and are common, depending on where you look.)

In this particular job, they offer $20 for 400 posts (or 2000 replies). Most often, one condition of posting such stuff is that it is at least unique, "original work" or would "pass copyscape".

So, there seem to be people who actually do this kind of job manually.

Exactly, real people are hired to generate backlinks via blog comments. I consider it spam, but since the goal is to make a relevant comment, that's debatable. The example given in this post however, is automated. You don't hire people to write unique content and have them list keywords. That's the type of spam I'm referring to as automated.

A school days friend of mine stopped developing at age ~17. Some very rare condition. Now he's about fourty and about to out-live his mother. However, there's no chance he'll ever live on his own.

Plenty of people live on their own at the age of 17.

I didn't bother to read the actual article, just responding to the headline: Did you ever look at getafreelancer.com? There are tons of jobs for captcha solving. Permanently.